Object detection employs computer vision and image processing techniques to detect semantic objects (such as humans or vehicles) in digital images and videos. Object detection techniques are often used, for example, for image retrieval and video surveillance. Object detection is typically performed using a sliding window approach in which the entire image is searched by sliding a window across the image in a scan-line fashion, testing for the object at each position. In addition, the search may include the range of each of several attributes at each position, such as for various sizes, rotations and poses. The cumulative search space is often very large resulting in high computational costs.
A need therefore exists for more computationally efficient techniques for object detection of images.